Sous Vide on the Cheap Side

I had heard about sous vide cooking and it was in interesting concept. But to purchase one of those machines was really out of the question, a question of priorities, how much sous vide was I going to do? Scott Heimendinger at Seattle Food Geek talk about this subject and how he created his own sous vide cooker. Although I knew my husband could make one for me, I have no room to store anything else in my house. I also preferred to spend my money on something else, like a piece of jewelry or a new computer tablet.

The whole concept of sous vide cooking is to cook slowly at constant temperature without having to monitor the food. Sound familiar? Sounded like a crock pot to me! I already had one in the cabin in NC, and my sister had one too and luckily she lives right next door. Fate also had a hand in this. I happened to run across a manual Ziploc vacuum food saver for ½ price, this was a no brainer – I got one. Then I saw a Handi-Vac with 3 bags included for $3.00, also a no brainer, got one of those too. And thirdly, I won an electric one at work at the Chinese Gift Exchange. Nobody could understand why I would want to keep the “white elephant” gift.

I did some research and designed an experiment. I needed to confirm the temperature that my crock pot maintained. If you are willing to try cheap sous vide at home, I would recommend you do this same experiment.

Fill the crock pot with water

Monitor the temperature every ½ hour at the warm setting

Once you have at least 2 readings at the same temperature, you have probably reached steady state (this is when the temperature is stable and does not significantly fluctuate)

Set to low and repeat

Set to high and repeat

My readings were:
Warm 145o F
Low 180 o F
High 198 o F

I did not want to try this the first time with chicken, so I decided to cook a steak. The research indicated that medium well steak needed to be cooked at around 135- 145 o F a little more or less cooked did not make a difference to me.

In addition, the research indicated you do not have to defrost the meat just cook it an extra 20 minutes. So I seasoned the frozen steak with a little salt and pepper, put one frozen steak in each of the bags, sucked the air out with my Handi-Vac, and dropped them in the crock pot using the warm setting which was 145 degrees.

The steaks cooked for 3 hours. I took them out of the bag and seared the steaks in a hot pan to caramelize and give the steaks a little color.

Add water to the Crock Pot

Perfect temperature at steady state

Steaks seasoned with salt and pepper

Creating the vacuum

Steaks ready after 3 hours

Side dish of potatoes

Pan fried at high temperature

Edges were also seared

Perfectly cooked medium well steak

The steaks were not bad, not bad at all! I would do it again if I were going to go skiing and was going to be gone all day, or I hosting a large party and everyone wanted the steaks medium well. Buying the right equipment would make it much more versatile, but the basic issue remains, where does one store a fish tank?